Guillaume Apollinaire – Zone – Selected Poems – “The fruit of poet-translator Ron Padgett‘s fifty-year engagement with the work of France’s greatest modern poet” –
(a bilingual edition) – has just been published by the New York Review Books.
Don’t miss it.
For Allen Ginsberg on Apollinaire – see (for example) his 1975 Naropa class here
(which includes, among other things, a complete reading and commentary on the title poem, “Zone”)
and here, here -(and, again, here)
“Guillaume, Guillaume how I envy your fame, your accomplishment for American letters/ your “Zonewith its long crazy line of bullshit about death/come out of the grave and talk through the door of my mind/issue new series of images oceanic haikus blue taxi-cabs in Moscow negro statues of Buddha/pray for me on the phonograph record of your former existence/ with a long sad voice and strophes of deep sweet music sad and scratchy as World War 1.” (from Allen Ginsberg – “At Apollinaire’s Grave”)
No, we can not stop singing the importance of, and singularity of, John Wieners. Two recent manifestations, courtesy the Christina Davis and the Harvard Woodberry Poetry Room – This – from 1962 (tho’ written in 1955) – “Ode to the Instrument”
(Robert Dewhurst‘s “Liner Notes”, helpful annotations, may be found here)
and this – (a recent “Oral History Initiative”) – Dewhurst oversees a spirited discussion amongst John’s friends – Ammiel Alcalay, Jim Dunn, Raymond Foye, Fanny Howe and Gerrit Lansing – memories of John.
Other “Oral History Initiatives” from the Woodberry Poetry Room include sessions on Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Frank O’Hara, & others Michael Seth Stewart answers questions here on editing John’s journals (his recent City Lights edition)
Jerry Cimino on rock musician Jimmy Page visiting the Beat Museum (“ogling all the manuscrips and letters and digging on Ginsberg’s typewriter”)
Paul Nelson’s first-hand account of the recent 4th European Beat Studies Network Conference contains an interview with Polina McKay, one of the co-founders of the Network – listen to it here
Four erstwhile Naropa faculty together for a recent reading in Woodstock, upstate New York – photo by Kim Spurlock
